Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Rick Perstein, a foremost historian on the rise of the American right, has a long piece on Donald Trump and fascism, comparing his emergence to the politics of other demagogues and fascists throughout the 20th century. It’s a thoughtful, detailed, assessment of the risks and the process. When Trump emerged, many folks started to compare …
Say goodbye to the Illinois History Museum. Bruce Rauner has pulled the plug. There’s something populist about museums like this. They tend to be free or cheap, they serve school kids from across the state, and they make our history accessible and interesting. Naturally, Billionaire Bruce isn’t going to permit that sort of thing to …
I met Arthur Chu this summer at a workshop on the problem of misogyny on the internet and we’ve been corresponding via email and social media a lot since then. Our writing interests overlap when it comes to representation issues in media and games. He interviewed me on the problem of claiming “authenticity” as a …
I have a new piece up with The Atlantic on the historic decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. It argues that the history of marriage supports, even mandates, change as societies change. We’re ready. History is with us. Love wins. Here’s the piece, with thanks to Anise Strong and Ruth Karras. — UPDATE – Anise Strong gave me …
I’ve become increasingly interested in nostalgia, especially when used as political discourse (following the scholarship of my friend Matthew Gabriele (@prof_gabriele), a professor at Virginia Tech). It reminded me of this recent essay from Andrew Potter, the editor of Ottawa Citizen, on the “Rise of Neo-Primitivism.” Potter describes the “neo-primitives” imagined by speculative fiction author William …
For Southern Nationalists, slavery was better than modern taxation and the KKK was just a neighborhood watch. From a Guardian piece: Kiscaden, who owns a coal mine in Kentucky, had an equally peculiar interpretation of history. He disputed that Forrest was a a founding member of the Klan, which he said played a positive role …
Last night I had the pleasure of watching one our nation’s great writers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, give a talk on the case for reparations at my university. The content of the talk was based on his recent major article for The Atlantic, which you should read. His thesis is that for 350 years, in an ongoing …
All the news lately on Bill O’Reilly has focused on his chronic exaggeration of his records as a reporter on war. The short story is that while has has seen violent things here and there, he’s not a war reporter, but it’s not likely Fox News or their audience will care. What I don’t want …
In an earlier post, I talked about crusades and memory, linking to my Guardian piece and talking about the meaning of the violence linked to Crusading. I suggested that historians might debate whether a given battle or moment of violence happened, or whether it happened because of religious hatred for “the other,” versus some other …
This is a guest post written by Ellen Arnold, PhD, Assistant Professor of History at Ohio Wesleyan University. “Perhaps the biggest thing missing from comparisons between Ebola and the bubonic plague, or in fact between any of these large scale tales of epidemic and pandemic disaster, is the human scale.” I am an environmental …